As we move into the second decade of the third millennium, it is made all the more obvious to us all that moving with the times is essential, no matter how difficult we may find it from time to time. At the start of this millennium, marketing your business via the Internet was a very simple thing. Get a website up and find as many different places to put a link as you imaginably could. This has changed in the last couple of years, and now the big deal is SEO – Search Engine Optimization. What is SEO? Well, it’s a little bit complicated, but the important elements you need to know are as follows.

Google and other search engines read every site that they can find and rank them on the basis of how appropriate they are for people’s search terms. Therefore, to make your site turn up in people’s search results you have to think about what they’ll be searching for, and what kind of terms will be used by people who might want to use your business. If you have a business that sells knitting supplies, then you will want to make sure that people who search for “best knitting supplies”, “cheap knitting supplies” and “knitting supplies [your city here]” are shown a link to your site.

Therefore you need to make sure these terms are in your website text, and you need to do it while keeping the text readable. It is not as easy as it looks, but – when you get the hang of it – it really works.